We assume then that the polytheism of the Greece of history was a blend of Northern and Mediterranean elements; and the poems of Homer may reveal a reflection of the early Achæan period when the fusion was not yet fully accomplished. Thus we find there that Athena, Hephaistos, Hermes and the Goddess of Argos had been already ‘Achæanised or Hellenised,’ and are warm champions of the Hellenic cause; while Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, though genealogically linked to the Olympian family, are {26} equally warm on the side of Troy and are treated by the poet with irreverence and even contumely. The position of Apollo is different. There are overpowering reasons for regarding him as of northern origin, a genuinely Achæan deity, and the Achæan poet treats him with deep respect. And we can only explain his pro-Trojan sympathies by the assumption that when the poems were composed his cult had become dominant on the Trojan shore, which he was therefore supposed to guard. But the ethnic decision is at present impossible on a vast number of details in this composite polytheism, in respect both of ritual and of the divine personalities; and the student of Hellenic religion must often abandon temporarily the quest of origins in his investigation of the composite whole. _Proto-Hellenic period_.--The very high development of this Mediterranean civilisation from which Hellenism drew so much of its own life is in itself sufficient reason for the belief that the advanced picture that Homer presents of his contemporary polytheism affords us a true estimate of the progress that had been achieved in the centuries before him. And this is corroborated by a careful analysis of the later cult-records. _Family religion_.--Society in the latter half of the second millennium had already reached the higher agricultural stage and had evolved the monogamic family. Demeter--whose Aryan descent is proved by her name--was generally recognised by the various Hellenic tribes as the Earth-Goddess of corn, and the very ancient festival of the Thesmophoria was commonly associated with her. Certain forms of the religion of the family, which was the life-source {27} of much of the private ethics of later Greece, can be traced back to the earliest period; the worship, for instance, of Zeus Ἑρκεῖος, the God of the garth, around whose altar in the courtyard of the old Aryan house the kinsmen gathered for worship. Another sacred centre of the family life in the pre-Homeric Society was doubtless the hearth and the hearth-stone in the middle of the hall; there are allusions to its sanctity in the Homeric poems, and the cult-records attest the great antiquity of this religious fact; although the development of the personal goddess Hestia is a later phenomenon.